The Miles-in-Trail Impact Assessment Capability
February 2007
Paul Ostwald, The MITRE Corporation
Tejal Topiwala, The MITRE Corporation
James DeArmon, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
Miles-in-Trail (MIT) restrictions are one of the most commonly used traffic
management initiatives. They are most often used to manage arrival flows into airports.
Traffic managers often use MIT restrictions to protect a destination airport, particularly
when capacity has been reduced due to weather or during periods of high volume. They also
use MIT restrictions to smooth out flows to support merging streams. Currently, traffic
managers must rely largely on experience to determine if a proposed MIT restriction will
have the intended effect on traffic demand, as no tool is available to specifically assess the
impact of proposed MIT restrictions. The inability to assess the impact of such a widely
used traffic management initiative can sometimes result in inefficient restrictions that
increase impacts on flights as well as controller effort. The MITRE Corporation's CAASD
has developed a prototype MIT Impact Assessment (MIA) capability which allows traffic
managers to evaluate the impact of proposed MIT restrictions on resources and flights
before implementing them. This paper proposes an operational concept for arrival MIT
restrictions using the MIA capability. This paper also provides an analysis to identify the
type of situations when the proposed MIA capability can be used in the future to employ less
restrictive MIT restrictions and to determine the impact of MIT restrictions on flying times.
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